Poverty is defined not only by a lack of material goods and opportunities, and
determining its borders is difficult. Poverty includes a lot of concepts such as
shortage of income, lack of education, inadequate nutrition and being
unhealthy. Although poverty is serious problem for large masses everywhere,
women are disproportionately poor. In Turkey the poverty rate is 17.10% for
men and 19.03% for women (TurkStat 2009).
Women may face gender discrimination in all spheres of social life:
employment, social and economic, political rights and moral obligation. Some
socially regressive beliefs or poverty of families lead to keeping of girls away
from school. Lack of education or low level of education results in
unemployment or working at low-paying jobs that require no specific
qualifications. In Turkey the labour force participation rate of women in 2010
was 27.6%. Of these, 45.9% were employed in the agriculture sector and
37.8% worked as no-wage family workers (TurkStat 2010). Another important
problem is that many women are working in the informal sectors. The
unregistered employment is estimated to be 60.5% for women in Turkey
(TurkStat 2010).
Gender equality or inequality is a major determinant of poverty and poor
health. Above mentioned restrictions and inequalities have a direct effect on
women’s health and well-being. Educated women are particularly useful for
improving health of women, their children, their family, and even entire
communities. In Turkey for example, rate of maternal mortality in 2005 was
28.5 (per 100,000 live births) but in western Anatolia (large of amount of
educated women) this rate decreased to 7.4.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss firstly the relationship between
poverty of women and their health, followed by an evaluation of the current
situation in Turkey done on the basis of statistical relation of women's poverty
vs. health.